Zach Wilson on what makes a great data engineer

Episode Overview

• Zach Wilson, a former data engineer at companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Airbnb, discusses his recent transition to becoming a full-time content creator and entrepreneur in the data space.
• He details his three primary ventures: creating educational data engineering content across five social media platforms, running a "Good to Great" bootcamp for experienced data engineers, and building a platform called TechCreator to help others with content creation.
• Zach shares his personal journey with content creation, which began over a decade ago, and explains the evolution of his strategy and the importance of consistency.
• The conversation explores the difference between tech-specific skills and more fundamental, tech-agnostic principles like data modeling and storytelling, arguing that the latter are more crucial for long-term career impact.

Key Concepts

• Career Path: Zach transitioned from data science to data engineering after realizing his passion for building systems was greater than his passion for building models and querying data.
• Content Creation Strategy: He focuses on creating short-form video content, believing it's the future of all social media platforms. He leverages a single video across multiple platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to maximize reach.
• "Good to Great" Bootcamp: Unlike entry-level courses, Zach's bootcamp is designed for existing data engineers who want to advance to the next level by focusing on tech-agnostic skills.
• Tech-Agnostic Skills: The episode emphasizes that skills like data modeling, data quality, observability, and storytelling are more critical for a data engineer's success than mastery of any single tool (e.g., Spark, Flink).
• Content Framework: Zach references a three-pillar content strategy: "Show" (educational content), "Grow" (inspirational/emotional content), and "Get to Know" (personal content), recommending a balance that prioritizes educational and inspirational posts.

Quotes

• At 00:46 - "But I realized that I like to build more than I like to like build models and query data and stuff like that. And that's where I found this nice intersection with data engineering." - Explaining his career shift from data science to data engineering.
• At 01:51 - "I have a theory that uh actually all social media is going to merge into like short form one to two minute videos...and it makes it easier for me because then I'm like, oh, I can make one video, post it five times." - Discussing his strategy and belief in the future of short-form video content.
• At 02:36 - "It's kind of like the 'good to great' bootcamp. So this is not like a breaking into data engineering bootcamp. This is you have a job as a data engineer and you want to learn the skills that are going to take you to the next level." - Defining the target audience for his data engineering course.
• At 08:25 - "The correct way to go is to just put your thoughts out there and let the algorithms and let the audience decide if it's valuable, not whether you think you are credible already." - Giving advice to aspiring content creators who feel they lack the credibility to start.
• At 16:29 - "Your product that you sell is data. It's not a pipeline." - Highlighting the fundamental principle that data engineers should focus on the end product (high-quality data) rather than just the tools and processes used to create it.

Takeaways

• To build a personal brand or following, prioritize consistency. Showing up regularly and posting content, even if it's not perfect, is more effective than sporadic, highly-polished posts.
• Focus your learning on foundational, tech-agnostic skills such as data modeling, data quality principles, and storytelling. These are transferable skills that provide more long-term career value than expertise in a single, specific technology that may become obsolete.
• Don't let a lack of perceived "credibility" stop you from sharing your knowledge. Start creating content about what you know; the act of sharing and receiving feedback is a powerful way to build both confidence and an audience.